Ruby on Rails

Today (August 4) there was time to watch the videos at rubyonrails.org. The “Migrating data and schema” video was impressive, showing how Ruby on Rails can create databases in its own language (Ruby) for multiple databases (MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL etc.).

However, the major turn off for me is Ruby’s lack of Unicode support. The impression I’m getting from Guido’s Python tutorial is that Python wants to support Unicode at its core—so I am curious about how this got away from Yukihiro. Unicode support implies (to me) UTF-8 support—and this is the life blood of professional, international XML.

XML feels like a “bad word” for Ruby on Rails people. Sean “nut job” Kelly tells me that Rails people condemn it to the death wished for Java XML configuration files. My guess today is that Rails people would direct my attention to a Ruby template instead of a framework-agnostic XSLT file. My current RESTafarian focus has me interested in ‘installing’ my XML over HTTP messaging solution with an XSL-driven UI on top of any stack (PHP, Rails, ASP.NET). It looks like REXML for Ruby is a start for the Rails way of achieving this. However, Ruby people seem to suggest that you do not build anything ‘on top’ of Rails. You sit in the rails and be amazed. The Ruby language is supposed to be just that seductive for the discriminating object-oriented Web programmer. Now all we have to do is amaze our clients to embrace this technology without an ‘easy’ exit strategy—just in case… You never know… unless, of course, you work for 37signals.com.

By the way: plone.org is the place where you can meet the “nut job” and the Python ‘equivalent’ of Drupal, Plone. My first glance at Plone has me a bit shy. Plone over Zope is very, very memory intensive. Sean, himself, suggests that an entire physical server be devoted to a Plone-Zope stack. Not wonderful news for us poor people.

By the way: Sean Kelly’s only objective critique of Django is that it requires a database connection for all of its applications. This comes to mind because Guido clearly and deliberately endorsed Django in FLOSS Weekly #11, noting its speed over Ruby on Rails and Plone.

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